Citizen-advocate George Swimmer spent twenty years investigating the causes behind railroad collisions. What he discovered is a tangled mess of both inadvertent and intentional mismanagement. In "Railroad Collisions," Swimmer reveals his findings. He faults the railroads themselves for poor risk management, but the industry is by no means the only culpable party. The Federal Railroad Administration's timid dealings with railroad companies impairs meaningful changes, while the National Transportation Safety Board's findings in many of their accident investigations are woefully, fatally incorrect. From commuter train collisions to engineer fatigue and a nationwide epidemic of incorrectly set safety crossing lights, Swimmer paints a picture of an industry willing to put complacency ahead of safety, often actively working against positive change. Swimmer supports his arguments with concrete examples. His interviews with locomotive engineers and a former safety director are thought-provoking and hard-hitting, while discussions with the parents of children killed in preventable railroad accidents provide a compassionate glimpse into the human cost of mismanaged risk. Doing for railway transportation what Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" did for the automobile industry, "Railroad Collisions" is a sobering look at how mismanagement and misinformation endangers lives throughout America's sprawling rail system.

This book discusses the risks of information concealment in the context of major natural or industrial disasters – offering detailed descriptions and analyses of some 25 historical cases (Three Mile Island nuclear accident, Bhopal disaster, Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster, Enron’s bankruptcy, Subprime mortgage crisis, Worldwide Spanish flu and SARS outbreaks, etc.) and applying these insights to selected on-going cases where such information concealment is suspected. Some successful examples of preventive anti-concealment practice are also presented. In the book, the term ‘concealment’ is used to represent the two distinct behaviors uncovered in the investigations: (i) facts and information about an organization and its functioning being hidden from those that need them – here the concealment can be due to various factors, such as complexity and miscommunication, to name but two – and (ii) the conscious and deliberate action of keeping important information secret or misrepresenting it. This second meaning makes up a surprisingly important part of the evidence presented. Accordingly, emphasis has been put on this second aspect and the approach is more pragmatic than academic, remaining focused on evidence-based practical and useful factors. It raises awareness and provides valuable lessons for decision- makers, risk specialists and responsible citizens alike. This work is also intended as a fact-based reference work for future academic and scholarly investigations on the roots of the problem, in particular regarding any psychological or sociological modeling of human fallibility.

A classic since its original landmark publication in 1980, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the first scholarly work to tell America's story from the bottom up-from the point of view of, and in the words of, America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant labourers. From Columbus to the Revolution to slavery and the Civil War-from World War II to the election of George W. Bush and the "War on Terror"-A People's History of the United States is an important and necessary contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.

SOMETIMES INFORMATION CAN BE THE MOST DANGEROUS WEAPON When the man he worked for abruptly exits the business, Quarry finds himself in the crosshairs as a rival tries to take over. But what does Quarry have that the new man wants? And how did the beautiful blonde in the swimming pool become a target? NOW A CINEMAX TELEVISION SERIES! The longest-running series from Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition, and the first ever to feature a hitman as the main character, the Quarry novels tell the story of a paid assassin with a rebellious streak and an unlikely taste for justice. Once a Marine sniper, Quarry found a new home stateside with a group of contract killers. But some men aren't made for taking orders - and when Quarry strikes off on his own, god help the man on the other side of his nine-millimeter...

A fast-paced guide to designing and building scalable and maintainable web apps with React.js About This Book Build maintainable and performant user interfaces for your web applications using React.js Create reusable React.js components to save time and effort in maintaining your user interfaces Learn how to build a ready-to-deploy React.js web application, following our step-by-step tutorial Who This Book Is For If you're a front-end developer with knowledge of jQuery and its libraries, along with frameworks, such as Angular.JS and Backbone.JS, or native JavaScript development, and you wish to use the fastest web user interface library there is, then this book is ideal for you. What You Will Learn Install powerful React.js tools to make development much more efficient Create React elements with properties and children Get started with stateless and stateful React components Use JSX to speed up your React.js development process Add reactivity to your React components with lifecycle methods Integrate your React components with other JavaScript libraries Utilize the Flux application architecture with your React components Test your React components with Jest test framework In Detail Building web applications with maintainable and performant user interfaces is a challenge that many have faced for more than a decade, but no one has risen to this challenge quite like React.js. Today React.js is used by Facebook, Instagram, Khan Academy, and Imperial College London, to name a few. Many new users recognize the benefits of React.js and adopt it in their own projects, forming a fast-growing community. The speed at which React.js has evolved promises a bright future for those who invest in learning it today. React.js Essentials will take you on a fast-paced journey through building your own maintainable React.js application. Begin by exploring how you can create single and multiple user interface elements. Create stateless and stateful components and make them reactive, learn to interact between your components and lifecycle methods and gauge how to effectively integrate your user interface components with other JavaScript libraries. Delve deep into the core elements of the Flux architecture and learn how to manage your application using stores. Finish by going that extra mile with the Jest test framework, running multiple tests on your application and find solutions to scale it further without complexity. Style and approach The book adopts a step-by-step, hands-on approach with ample codes to ensure you learn React.js at a fast pace.